"Starting with Surprise", Liu Qing et al., Ideal Republic | Beijing Daily Publishing House, January 2022
From your age, when you were in middle school, until now, I have enjoyed watching science fiction movies, reading science fiction novels, and playing games, and there are two themes that I particularly like, one is robots and the other is zombies. I don't know if you like it or not?
First of all, I would like to ask you what movies and animations about robots have you seen? What do robots look like in your minds? I have 10 movie posters for the robot genre here: The Terminator (1984), RoboCop (1987), Bicentennial Man (1999), Artificial Intelligence (AI) (2001), I,ROBOT (2004), Transformers (2007) (Transformers), 2008's Wall-E (WALL· E), "Pacific Rim" in 2013, "Big Hero 6" in 2014, and "Robopocalypse" that will be released at some point.
There are many robot types of movies, and the robots contained in them are also diverse. There are robots like Robocop, which transform people into machines; like the Gundam series and Pacific Rim, where people control robots; like Transformers, which looks like robots, but is actually alien robots; and finally, it's purely artificialLY made AI robots, which are the robots we mainly discuss in this talk.
Stills from Transformers
For the last type of robot, the recent movie has discussed a lot, mainly thinking that if this kind of AI robot has autonomous consciousness, free will, or has a soul, will it still abide by the "three laws of robots"? Will they become "bad robots"—for example, rebel against human domination, or even rule humanity in turn? Will they purge (slaughter) humans? Once individual robots, or even all robots, have acquired autonomous consciousness, free will, or souls, can they be counted as human beings? If they wanted to fight for human rights, would you agree? These questions actually involve a key question: Do AI robots have a mind or autonomous consciousness? Will there be a mind in the future?
Let's keep this question in mind for a moment, and then I want to ask you what movies, animations, or zombie-themed games you've seen, or played? What do zombies look like in your minds?
Let's look at 10 interesting zombie films: Night of the Living Dead (1968); Dawn of the Dead (1978); Braindead (199), directed by Peter Jackson and more bloody and violent; 2002 ,28 Days Later; 2002. Resident Evil; Shaun of the Dead (2004), a comedy film; 2005's Land of the Dead; I Am Legend (2007); "World War Z" (2013), a spit on god films; and finally, an American drama ,"The Walking." Dead）。
Since the zombie genre is a plasma film at the beginning, whether it is a movie or a game, it is a selling point of bloody violence. Therefore, there is a lot less thinking in it than in the robot genre movie. As for the reasons for the formation of zombies, some are due to biochemical infections, some are due to radiation, and some are due to parasitism of extraterritorial organisms, and the situation is various and varied. Since the zombie is set to eat people, it is usually the enemy of humans who fight with humans. However, I've seen that some recent movies and novels have started to think about this setting, such as the evolution of zombies that are often mentioned, and the problem of raising zombies.
If you think about it more seriously, there may be these questions: Do zombies still retain human sanity? Can they regain their sanity? This involves a holistic view of zombies, whether they are sick or have they turned into non-human beings? If zombies don't attack people, will people who don't become zombies treat them as mentally ill patients, or will they continue to kill them? If zombies not only eat people, but also animal carcasses, can we feed them? Will zombies evolve a mind or mind? The basis or core of these questions is this question: Do zombies still have hearts or minds?
How do philosophers think about mind and body?
Philosophers ponder this question much more complexly. From a philosophical point of view, the real question is: What exactly is the mind? There are many sub-questions under this question. One of the most important questions is: What is the relationship between the mind and the body? In the view of philosophers, we can not only ask whether robots or zombies have a mind, but even whether we humans have a mind? If anything, what is the mind? Is the mind and body the same? If not, what is the difference between the two? If it is the same, then is the mind the body, or the body is the mind (the two expressions seem to be synonymous and repeated, in fact, the meanings implied are different, which will be analyzed later), or is the essence of the mind and the body something else?
A philosophy that discusses these issues is called the "philosophy of mind." It is a branch of contemporary philosophy. Based on the answer to the question "Is the mind the same as the body?", we can roughly divide the philosophers' thoughts into two categories: those who answer "no" can be called "(mind-body) dualism"; and those who answer "yes" can be called "(mind-body) monism".
Monism can be further divided into:
1. Materialist monism. This philosophical theory holds that "the mind is the body", that is, the essence of both is material.
2. Idealistic monism. This philosophical theory holds that "the body is the mind", that is, the essence of both is immaterial.
3. Neutral monism. This philosophical theory holds that the mind and the body are one thing, but that this thing is neither the body nor the mind, but something of the third kind different from them. As for what this thing is, different philosophers have different views. The ideas of such philosophers are usually called neutral monism.
Dualism is the main force in traditional philosophy, close to today's popular thought, although it has been criticized and denied for a long time in contemporary philosophical circles, but this theory is after all the beginning of the philosophy of the mind, and has a profound impact on the philosophy of later generations and the thinking of the masses. Another important point is materialist monism, which is the mainstream idea of today's philosophy of mind, especially Anglo-American philosophy, which gradually took the throne with the rise of scientism.
In a word, materialist monism holds that the mind is the same as the body, and that the mind is material like the body.
The basic proposition of materialist monism is to deny the existence of mental phenomena and physical phenomena, as well as the existence of two kinds of entities, mind and matter; to maintain that all phenomena are physical phenomena, and there is no mental entity but only a material entity. As far as the mind and the body are concerned, materialist monism holds that the mind is not some kind of immaterial reality separate from the body, but something material like the body, following the same physical laws as the body.
In general, the larger any power, the more internal divisions it tends to be. Within the huge force of materialist monism, there are many different schools, mainly including: behaviorism, identity theory, functionalism, hermeneuticism, abolitionism, and so on. Next, I will briefly introduce these theories separately.
"Sub-fish, the joy of the fish"?
The rise of behaviorism in the early 20th century dealt a heavy blow to the ancient idea of dualism and the traditional study of the mind.
Behaviorism originally had its origins in a very old problem—the problem of his mind. We all experience only our own joys and sorrows (and hearts) directly, but how can we know that others have the same joys and sorrows (and hearts) as we do? Since we cannot directly experience the minds of others, the existence of the minds of others cannot be proved, but is merely a philosophical assumption.
Wittgenstein, a very famous contemporary philosopher, made an interesting analogy in his book Philosophical Studies (1953) - "the beetle in the box".
Wittgenstein
He hypothesized that there is a world where everyone is born with a box, but each person can only look at his own box, not other people's boxes. People in this world have been taught from an early age that the things in the box are called "beetles", and everyone can only understand what a beetle is by observing what is in their box. Maybe everyone's box contains different beetles, some are scarab beetles, some are ladybugs, and the color and size are also different. There are even people whose boxes contain frogs or goldfish, and there may be people whose boxes contain nothing. But it doesn't matter, because everyone's box is a beetle or not, no one knows whether it's a beetle or not, including himself, because he's only seen what's in his box and calls it a "beetle"; importantly, all learn to use a set of language patterns and be able to talk to each other without any obstacle about their own or other people's "beetles", and that's enough.
In Wittgenstein's view, the so-called mind is actually such a "beetle in the box".
Contemporary behaviorism further borrows the metaphor of the "beetle in a box" to criticize Descartes' materialistic dualism. The reason for The Existence of the Mental Entity in Cartesian dualism is that although each of us cannot experience the minds of others, we can all experience our own minds directly, thus proving the existence of the mental entities, and thus Descartes regards "I Think" as the starting point and the most solid foundation of philosophy. However, the "beetle in the box" thought experiment has made us notice that it is possible that not only do we not know the "beetle" in someone else's box, we don't even know whether what is in our own box is a beetle or not.
Behaviorism thus asserts that the mind and mental events and phenomena that Descartes dualism claims as an entity are actually invented and fictionalized by people in the use of language, rather than real. In the behaviorist view, behavior is the response to stimuli, and man is the actor who responds to environmental stimuli. What connects stimuli and responses is a complex mechanical mechanism. Therefore, man is nothing more than a machine. The mental entity of Cartesian dualism, like a ghost, is a superstition that should be dispelled by science.
In this sense, the famous contemporary philosopher Gilbert Ryle called the mind "the ghost in the machine."
Philosophical behaviorism is a weaker version of behaviorism, which holds that we do not know and can only doubt whether the mind has it or not, but we know that all descriptions of mental states can actually be analyzed, translated, and paraphrased as statements about behavior or tendencies to act. To speak of a person's state of mind is to talk about the behaviors and tendencies he exhibits when he does certain things. Thus, mental states can be "reduced to" behaviors or behavioral tendencies.
Gilbert Ryle
In Chinese, we often use the phrase "zi non-fish, anzhi fish pleasure" to express this ancient question of his heart, which is from "Zhuangzi". Interestingly, in the face of this question, Zhuangzi made a somewhat behaviorist answer.
Behaviorism, which flourished in the 1960s, also encountered many difficulties, including the problem of defining behavior or behavioral tendencies, and the diversity of stimulus-response patterns. Studies have shown that stimuli and responses do not correspond to each other, that the stimulus-response patterns of the same person are not consistent, and that the stimulus-response patterns of different people are very different.
All mental phenomena or events are physical phenomena or events
Since the 1940s, with the rapid development of physics, computer science, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, etc., the same theory has gradually flourished. Founded in the 1950s by Faiger, Price, and Smart.
The so-called "same theory" in contemporary philosophy of mind, if fully expressed, should be called "the same theory of mind and brain", and its core idea is one sentence: the heart is the brain. In the same theory, the complex mental activity of human beings is essentially the physical movement or physical skill of the brain, and the mental state is the state of the brain's nervous system. Therefore, independent mental entities, irreducible mental properties, principles beyond the chain of physical causation are impossible. All mental phenomena or events are physical phenomena or events, all causal relations are the relationships between physical events, there is no independent mental event outside the physical event, there is no independent spiritual kingdom. For example, the same theory attributes pain to activation of class C nerve fibers.
Specifically, first, at the linguistic level, mental words have the same denotations as words that indicate the neural state of the brain (some scholars even believe that the two have the same meaning). I'll use an example to illustrate the terms "reference" and "sense." Everyone knows that Lu Xun is zhou Zuoren's older brother and the author of "Diary of a Madman". The two words "Brother of Zhou Zuoren" and "Author of the Diary of a Madman" are the same, that is, lu xun, but it is obvious that the meanings of these two words are different. Second, from the level of cognition, we can observe the processes and phenomena inside the brain from the two aspects of psychology and physics (including physiology, neuroscience, etc.), but these two cognitions observe the same object. Third, from a practical level, the heart is the central nervous system of the brain, and human mental activity is actually the physical movement of the central nervous system of the human brain.
The same theory has had a great influence, but this theory has also encountered many theoretical difficulties. One of the most important difficulties is called the "achievable difficulty of diversity". The so-called "multiplicable realizability" means that a role can be realized by different things, so "variable realizability difficulty" refers to a difficulty in which a role cannot be realized by different things. The same theory holds that the relationship between mental states and brain states is a one-to-one correspondence (whether it is a one-to-one correspondence of type or a one-to-one correspondence of individual cases). According to this theory, if at some point the mental belief that "it is going to rain" is the activation of certain nerves in your brain, then at any other moment this mental belief should be the activation of these nerves in your brain, and the same is true for others, that is, the activation of the same nerves. But neither the study of neuroscience nor our daily experience supports this assumption.
Not only that, but humans and other animals are very different in the neural structure of the brain, and if we think that mental states always have a one-to-one correspondence with the state of a certain brain nervous system, as the same theory suggests, the psychological feeling of "pain" is the same as the "activation of class C nerve fibers", then this negates the mental activity of animals whose brain structure is very different from that of humans. For example, the cute cats and Wang xingren, they are very different from our human brain structure, can we deny that they have hearts and emotions? What about octopus? What about non-carbon-based creatures in science fiction? In a way, the same theory falls into the error of anthropocentrism.
Mind and body are like computer software and hardware
In order to overcome the anthropocentrism of the same theory, some scholars argue that we should not equate mental states with a certain neurological state in the brain, but it is better to equate it with causal action or functional action. As long as a system is in a state of causality as if the nerve fibers of class C are activated and thus play the same causal state, even if the materials and structures on which this state depends are not those of the human nervous system, it can be considered to be in the psychological state of pain. In other words, what is the same as the mental state is not the physiological state of the human brain nervous system, but a certain functional role. As a result, some scholars moved toward functionalism.
The basic idea of functionalism is to use functional attributes to explain psychological attributes and functional states to explain psychological states. In other words, the purpose of functionalism is to reduce mental states to functional states, using the latter to naturalize the former. According to functionalism, human mental activities, states, and events are manifestations or similar manifestations of brain function, and this function is similar to the function of computers in storing, processing, calculating, and outputting input information. Function has its own independence, which is different from both physical and chemical properties, nor is it immaterial and supernatural. Therefore, the mind and body are like the software and hardware of a computer. Just as the function of the computer is expressed in a material way, the function of the human brain is also realized through the material way.
Let's take pain as an example to compare the differences between the three materialist theories. Behaviorism holds that the mind can be reduced to behavior or behavioral tendencies. Therefore, the so-called feeling of pain is nothing more than a behavioral tendency to show pain (e.g., convulsions, moaning) or tend to show pain. The same theory holds that the mind is the brain and that the mental state is the state of the nervous system of the brain. Therefore, the pain you feel is actually the stimulation of the C-type nerve fibers in your brain. Functionalism, on the other hand, holds that the mind is actually functioning. Any state of a physical system is a state of mind as long as it has a direct causal relationship with input stimuli, with other functions of the system, and with the output system. Thus, the so-called feeling of pain is a state caused by stimulation of peripheral nerve endings, which in turn causes certain behavioral and other functional states, which exist as a causal agent between typical pain inputs (e.g., tissue injuries, trauma) and typical pain outputs (e.g., convulsions, moaning).
Functionalism is inspired by the development of contemporary cognitive science, artificial intelligence, informatics and other disciplines, and represents an important development direction of philosophy of mind, but this theory still has some difficulties that cannot be solved by itself, such as the problem of defining function and the problem of the nature of feelings. Among these difficulties, the more interesting is John Searle's "Chinese House" thought experiment in the early 1980s.
John Searle
Imagine a person who only speaks English in a room that is all enclosed except for a small window on the door. He carried with him a manual with Chinese translation procedures. There was also enough paper, pencils and cupboards in the room. Through the display, the outside world will display the Chinese to the people in the house. The people in the room could use his books to translate the words and reply with Chinese. (For example, the display shows "Wishing you prosperity", and the person in the house finds the corresponding word "thank you" according to the translation program manual, writes it down, and passes it outside the house.) ）
Although the people in the room would not Chinese at all, Searle believed that through this process, the person in the room could make anyone outside the room think that he would speak fluently Chinese. According to functionalism, the people in this room understand Chinese, but the truth is not like this at all. This reflects the counter-common sense of functionalism, because if the mind is understood according to the theory of functionalism, then Siri on the phone also has a mind.
The mind is imposed or attributed to man in order to explain man's behavior
Hermeneuticism originated from a school of contemporary continental European philosophy, hermeneutics. Hermeneutics once swept across the European continent and gradually influenced Anglo-American philosophy. In contemporary philosophy of mind, hermeneuticism is unique and is increasingly exerting its influence, and its representative figures are among the best in the contemporary philosophical world, such as Davidson and Dennett.
As a philosophical theory of mind, hermeneuticism has a unique approach and provides a novel and intriguing way of solving traditional physical and mental problems. It does not directly think about what the mind is, what structure and function it has, what its physical mechanism and foundation are, and what its relationship with the body is, but takes the question of answering and explaining how human speech and behavior are possible as its starting point, and after a meticulous discussion of the conditions and basis of interpretation, it finally forms a new philosophical theory of mind.
The basic view of hermeneuticism is that it asserts that man has no mind and no intention of moving toward the state, and that the mind is the product of our explanatory projection or regulation, in other words, that the mind is imposed or attributed to man in order to explain man's behavior. It is not because man first has propositional attitudes such as beliefs and wishes and then produces knowledge about them and corresponding mental language in turn, but on the contrary, we first have a mental language, first have an explanatory theory, and then use these languages to explain people, and finally attribute the propositional attitudes to man's practice, and then we have a mind. In short, the mind is not really evolved, as it has been taken for granted since ancient times, but is set up for the need to explain.
Let's first look at Davidson's projective hermeneuticism. The traditional realist view of the mind holds that our concept of propositional attitudes about the mind, beliefs, thoughts, etc. is a reflection of the mental state, psychological attributes, and mental processes of objective existence, but Davidson believes that this is all wrong. In his view, there is no such state of mind as belief. That is, when we say "someone has a certain belief," we don't reflect the fact that objective existence is the same as we say, "There's a book on the table." "Someone has a certain belief" is not a declarative sentence, but an attribution statement, which is "imposed" or "projected" to others by the interpreter in order to explain the verbal behavior of others.
Davidson initiated a "Copernican revolution", that is, the idea of the mind is not the result of man's cognition and reflection, but that man invents and imposes on man or belongs to man for the sake of explanation. "In thinking and talking about the weight of physical objects, we don't have to assume the existence of something like the weight of an object, just as we don't have to assume the existence of beliefs or anything like that when thinking and talking about human beliefs," he said. ”
For example, the measurement of 28 ° C heat, 5 meters long, and 18 pounds of weight is not actually a property of the objects themselves, but we impose on these objects out of the need to explain. Similarly, longitude, latitude, time zone, etc., are not things that the earth itself has; they are all imposed on the earth by us. In Davidson's view, propositional attitudes such as mind and belief are the same, they are not real things. If someone were to ask whether the mind really existed and what the mind was, he would be as foolish as someone describing a place on earth with a line of latitude and longitude and then looking for the line of longitude and latitude on earth.
Let's look again at Dennett's normative hermeneuticism. Like Davidson, the essence and characteristic of Dennett's philosophy of mind is "the deceptiveness of the mind." He clearly pointed out: "The human mind itself is an artificial product created by people for convenience when reconstructing the human brain. "The more we discuss the details of the mechanical and fundamentally biological, the more hypotheses we have to discard." Obviously, in his view, theories such as the dualism of mind and mind and the mysticism of the mind should be among those he calls "abandonment.".
It is important to note, however, that hermeneuticism has not slid to the extreme of abolitionism. For hermeneuticism emphasizes that things like the mind and beliefs and desires, although we set them, are "indispensable."
Do mental states such as beliefs and wishes not exist?
Abolitionism was introduced by James Cornman (1929-1978) in 1968, received a number of scholars, and subsequently spread widely in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. It is the most radical attempt at ontological transformation in contemporary philosophy of mind, the most extreme materialist monist form.
Abolitionism encompasses two aspects: on the one hand, it breaks the theoretical principles and assumptions of folk psychology; on the other hand, it seeks to replace folk psychology with neuroscience or cognitive science.
Let's first look at the "broken" side of abolitionism. Abolitionism holds that folk psychology does exist in everyday explanatory and predictive activities and permeates psychology, philosophy, and classical cognitive science. However, it is completely wrong, and the mental states it envisages such as beliefs, wishes, etc. do not exist, and its concepts are also wrong.
First, from an ontological point of view, abolitionism argues that the reality asserted by folk psychology simply does not exist. For example, for my visit to a restaurant, according to folk psychology, we generally refer to mental states such as feelings (such as feelings of hunger), desires (such as the desire to eat), and beliefs (such as believing that food will relieve hunger). Abolitionism, however, argues that these states of mind do not exist at all, and that mental states are the same as the concepts of hormones, heat matter, and demons believed in folk chemistry, folk physics, and witchcraft, and are false and ignorant.
Secondly, from the perspective of the philosophy of language, abolitionism holds that since there are no mental states or psychological realities such as beliefs and wishes in human beings, the concepts and words that express them are also empty concepts without reference. With the development of science and the common sense and popularization of its terminology, these concepts and the language of popular psychology will inevitably withdraw from the stage of history and be replaced by the precise language of science. For example, some of the pre-scientific concepts of aether, flammables, and life essence are now little known.
Finally, from a methodological point of view, the interpretation and prediction models of folk psychology, as well as the laws and principles inherent in them, will inevitably be abandoned. Folk psychology usually interprets or predicts someone's behavior based on what they believe, expect, desire, like, or fear. However, in the view of abolitionism, this mode of interpretation and prediction and its principles are based on analogies, metaphors, and not scientific understanding of internal processes and their relationship to behavior, so they cannot escape the fate of elimination.
Let's look at the "standing" side of abolitionism. If folk psychology is really abolished, how can we communicate with others? How do we describe, interpret, and predict human behavior? Abolitionism replied that we needed to go beyond folk psychology to establish new conceptual schemas that were separate from the forms and categories represented by natural language. To this end, abolitionism proposes three ideas.
The first idea is to build new cognitive kinematics and dynamics. The Churchlands envision that as we delve deeper into the microscopic and global structure and activity of the brain, a new kind of cognitive science will eventually emerge. This new theory can be applied not only to humans, but also to all terrestrial animals, and maintains a conceptual fit with evolutionary biology and non-equilibrium thermodynamics.
For example, if a person utters a declarative sentence that he is sure of, the sentence is only a one-dimensional projection, that is, projected onto that person's particular linguistic surface through the composite lens of the Broca and Wernicke regions. This one-dimensional projection is a factor in his true kinematic state. Since these sentences are projections of internal reality, they carry important information related to reality and thus become factors that play a role in the communication system. But since they are only projections of subdimensionals, i.e., one-dimensional projections of a four- or five-dimensional reality, they reflect only a small fraction of the reality being projected, and are therefore ill-suited to characterize all the kinematic, kinetic, and normative aspects of such reality.
The second idea is to build a superlanguage. Chomsky believed that the human mind or brain contains an innate structure that allows people to learn and use a natural language. Based on a new understanding of this inner structure, we can build a new system of linguistic communication that is completely different from natural language. This new language can be called a "super-language." Once this language is established, then, then, the schema in which "supra-linguistic attitudes" play a leading role will completely replace the linguistic schema of folk psychology.
The third idea is to create artificial "callosums". The two hemispheres of the brain have different functional emphases, but the two hemispheres can use the information obtained from each other, and the channel of information transmission is the callosum. Since the left and right brains, as two physically different cognitive systems, can communicate information in a systematic, learning way, why not the brain and the brain? Imagine that one day we can make a converter buried in the brain, this converter can convert neural activity into microwave signals, which are transmitted through an antenna on the forehead, which in turn can also receive foreign microwave signals and convert them into neural signals. This transformer can act as a corpus callosum, and one person's brain can communicate directly with another person's brain, so that daily language communication is purely superfluous.
In short, although abolitionism refers directly to folk psychology, its drunken meaning is in the traditional psychological concept schema and even the entire traditional philosophical study of the mind.
The idealistic monism that profoundly influenced The Matrix
As we have said before, the difficulty of mind-body dualism (especially Cartesian dualism) lies in the problem of causal interaction between mind and body, and mind-body monism is a good way to avoid falling into this dilemma. Although in contrast to the materialist path, few serious philosophers in contemporary times have really adopted the idealistic monism path, so much so that contemporary philosophy of mind basically does not discuss this line of thought. Here I will give a very brief introduction to the general idea of idealistic monism.
The basic proposition of idealism is that the world is made up of the mind and its contents. In other words, there is only such a thing as the mind, and matter is nothing but an illusion. As far as the mind and the body are concerned, idealistic monism holds that the essence of the body is also spiritual. Since there are no non-mental material objects or physical events at all, there is no need to worry about mind-body interaction.
It is important to note that idealism is not the same as solipsism. For the mind that idealism advocates that makes up the world can be either my mind, the mind of others, or the mind of God. This theory is called solipsism only if it is asserted that the world is made up of my mind.
At first glance, idealism is very counterintuitive. But it is not uncommon in movies and novels. You may have all seen the Matrix movie series, or you may have heard of the "brain in a vat" thought experiment. The "brain in a vat" is a hypothesis expounded by the American philosopher Hillary Putnam in his book Reason, Truth, and History in 1981. He envisions:
A person (who can be assumed to be yourself) is operated on by an evil scientist, and his brain is cut off from the body and placed in a vat containing nutrients to keep the brain alive. The nerve endings of the brain are connected to a computer that programs messages to the brain so that he can keep everything completely normal. For him, it seems that people, objects, and the sky still exist, and their own movements and physical sensations can be input. The brain can also be input or intercepted memories (e.g., memories of brain surgery are taken out, and then entered into various environments and daily lives that it may have experienced). He can even be entered into code and "feel" that he himself is reading an interesting and ridiculous text here.
Stills from The Matrix
Is this thought experiment close to the setting of The Matrix?
However, both The Matrix and the Brain in the Vat thought experiment also set some kind of physical mechanism as the basis. Let's look at another thought experiment that is closer to idealism and a similar film.
The "skeptical argument of dreams" was put forward by Descartes, the great philosopher of the 17th century mentioned earlier, in his book The First Philosophical Meditations, "The First Meditations." This thought experiment boils down to one sentence – "How do you know you're not in a dream?" "Anyone who has seen 'Inception' knows that the male protagonist uses a spinning top as a symbol to distinguish dreams from reality. But anyone who has read and thought carefully about Descartes' Meditations on the First Philosophy or who knows something about the theory of knowledge since Descartes knows, "How do you know that you are not in a dream?" "It's a very difficult question to answer and argue for. To some extent, it can even be said that Descartes' First Philosophical Meditations and the theory of knowledge in modern times are attempts to answer this question. This problem is far from being solved by a spinning top, and the open-ended ending of Inception actually hints at this.
Whether it is "Brain in the Vat" and "The Matrix", or "Doubtful Argument of Dreams" and "Inception", such an idea is not difficult to push forward to idealism. Maybe we live in dreams all the time, our own dreams, the dreams of others, or the dreams of God. Recently, there are often online novels such as "wearing books", the characters in the books are two-dimensional, we are three-dimensional, but is it possible that we are also living in someone else's book? Can't our so-called reality be just something in the mind of the author of the high plane? These assumptions or doubts are actually very close to idealism. However, in reality, people who are really so convinced and advocate idealism are very rare.
But in the history of philosophy, there have been philosophers who have seriously argued about this. This philosopher is Berkeley of the 17th and 18th centuries. In simple terms, his argument for idealistic monism is this: we don't really know that the table exists, we just see some colors and shapes, and the hand feels resistance. In other words, we have only some senses in our minds. No one knows whether there is realism behind these perceptions. Maybe everything is just an idea. Therefore, "to exist is to be perceived" The argument he made was in some ways almost invulnerable, so much so that his contemporaries gritted their teeth at his doctrine and were helpless to call him "a mad piano."
Original author | Shi Xuan
Excerpts | Xu Yuedong
Editor| Zhang Ting
Introduction Proofreader | Lucy